The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page B

AN ’ T P UNCTUATE .
    I plunged east into Illinois. I was heading for Springfield, the state capital, and New Salem, a restored village where Abraham Lincoln lived as a young man. My dad had taken us there when I was about five and I thought it was wonderful. I wondered if it still was. I also wanted to see if Springfield was in any way an ideal town. One of the things I was looking for on this trip was the perfect town. I’ve always felt certain that somewhere out there in America it must exist. When I was small, WHO-TV in Des Moines used to show old movies every afternoon after school, and when other children were out playing kick-the-can or catching bullfrogs or encouraging little Bobby Birnbaum to eat worms (something he did with surprising amenability), I was alone in a curtained room in front of the TV, lost in a private world, with a plate of Oreo cookies on my lap and Hollywood magic flickering on my eyeglasses. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the films WHO showed were mostly classics— The Best Years of Our Lives, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, It Happened One Night. The one constant in these pictures was the background. It was always the same place, a trim and sunny little city with a tree-lined Main Street full of friendly merchants (“Good morning, Mrs. Smith!”) and a courthouse square, and wooded neighborhoods where fine houses slumbered beneath graceful arms. There was always a paperboy on a bike slinging papers onto front porches, and a genial old fart in a white apron sweeping the sidewalk in front of his drugstore and two men in suits striding briskly past. These two background men always wore suits, and they always strode smartly, never strolled or ambled, but strode in perfect synchrony. They were really good at it. No matter what was going on in the foreground—Humphrey Bogart blowing away a bad guy with a .45, Jimmy Stewart earnestly explaining his ambitions to Donna Reed, W. C. Fields lighting a cigar with the cellophane still on it—the background was always this timeless, tranquil place. Even in the midst of the most dreadful crises, when monster ants were at large in the streets or buildings were collapsing from some careless scientific experiment out at State U, you could still generally spot the paperboy slinging newspapers somewhere in the background and those two guys in suits striding along like Siamese twins. They were absolutely imperturbable.
    And it wasn’t just in the movies. Everybody on TV—Ozzie and Harriet, Wally and Beaver Cleaver, George Burns and Gracie Allen—lived in this middle-class Elysium. So did the people in the advertisements in magazines and on the commercials on television and in the Norman Rockwell paintings on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. In books it was the same. I used to read Hardy Boys mysteries one after the other, not for the plots, which even at the age of eight I could see were ridiculously improbable (“Say, Frank, do you suppose those fellows with the funny accents that we saw at Moose Lake yesterday weren’t really fisherman, but German spies, and that the girl in the bottom of their canoe with the bandage around her mouth wasn’t really suffering from pyorrhea but was actually Dr. Rorshack’s daughter? I’ve got a funny feeling those fellows might even be able to tell us a thing or two about the missing rocket fuel!”). No, I read them for Franklin W. Dixon’s evocative, albeit incidental, descriptions of Bayport, the Hardy Boys’ hometown, a place inexpressively picturesque, where houses with porch swings and picket fences peeked out on a blue sweep of bay full of sailboats and skimming launches. It was a place of constant adventures and summers without end.
    It began to bother me that I had never seen this town. Every year on vacation we would drive hundreds and hundreds of miles across the country, in an insane pursuit of holiday happiness, toiling over blue hills and brown prairies,